The 'secret' Goldman tapes

An influential U.S. senator wants to hold hearings into 'disturbing' issues raised by secretly taped conversations between Federal Reserve supervisors and officials at Goldman Sachs, a firm the Fed was tasked with policing.

Carmen Segarra, a former New York Fed bank examiner who brought a wrongful termination lawsuit against her former employer, recorded the conversations and provided them to the investigative news outlet ProPublica and the public radio show 'This American Life' to illustrate what she saw as an inappropriately close relationship between regulator and bank.

The tapes appear to show an unwillingness among some Fed supervisors to both demand specific information from Goldman about a transaction with Banco Santander and to strongly criticize what Segarra concluded was the lack of an appropriate conflict-of-interest policy at Goldman.